Chapter 106: Apple Angel

Torin’s POV

I still was not entirely sure why I had agreed to come.

Rhydor had said he needed supplies. Axes specifically, which was exactly the kind of thing Rhydor said when he wanted company but could not bring himself to ask for it directly.

I had looked at him standing in the doorway of the house that morning with his coat already on, and his expression already closed off, and had thought about pointing this out.

But I had not pointed it out.

I put on my own coat and came anyway.

The market was loud. It was always loud in the mornings, everyone arriving at the same time with the same urgency, vendors calling out across each other, children finding the most inconvenient possible paths between the stalls and committing to them with absolute dedication.

The smell of fresh bread was coming from somewhere to the left, and roasted meat from somewhere ahead, and the combination of both sitting in the morning air was the kind of thing that made a person feel like the day might turn out reasonable after all.

We moved through it side by side. Not talking. Not because anything was wrong. Just quiet in the way Rhydor and I had always been able to be quiet together when words were not needed to fill the space.

"What exactly are we looking for?" I asked.

"Axes," he said. Not looking at me. Eyes moving across the stalls with the focused efficiency of someone who knew what they wanted and was locating it.

I looked at him sideways. "What is it with you and axes?"

"What is it with you and daggers?"

I opened my mouth. Closed it. The man had a point and we both knew it.

I shook my head and kept walking. Some things had not changed since we were seventeen years old and probably never would.

We reached a junction where the market split in two directions. The larger stalls were ahead and the more specialized vendors were down the narrower path to the left. Rhydor looked both ways with the expression of someone doing a calculation.

"Wait here," he said. "I will be back."

I looked at him. "I am not a dog. I will not wait."

"Then do not get lost."

"I grew up here," I said. "I know this market like the back of my hand."

His mouth moved. Just slightly. The corner of it was shifting upward by an amount that on anyone else would not qualify as an expression, but on Rhydor was practically a performance.

"You do not see the back of your hand," he replied.

I stared at him, annoyingly. "Just go find your axes."

He walked away. I watched him disappear into the crowd, broad shoulders clearing a path through the morning traffic without any apparent effort.

"Idiot," I muttered, then turned and started walking.

Not toward anything specific. Just moving. Looking at the stalls as I passed them. A vendor with fabrics in colors that had no business being that bright this early in the morning. A woman was selling small clay pots painted with patterns I did not recognize. An old man sitting behind a table covered in dried herbs, asleep in his chair, somehow still managing to look like he was available for business.

I walked past all of it with my hands in my pockets and my mind somewhere else entirely.

Thinking about yesterday, I turned a corner without looking. And a basket hit the ground with the particular sound of a basket hitting the ground, loud and sudden, followed immediately by apples going in every direction at once.

They rolled across the path with great enthusiasm, bumping into boots and disappearing under stall tables and generally making themselves as difficult to retrieve as possible.

"Oh! I am so sorry..."

She was already crouching down. Both hands moving fast, gathering apples, her voice soft and flustered, and aimed somewhere at the ground in front of her. She had not looked up yet.

I crouched down beside her immediately.

"No," I said. "It was my fault. I was not watching where I was going."

I reached for the nearest apple. She reached for the same one at the same moment. My hand landed on hers.

That was when I looked up.

She was looking at me.

Not the bold kind of looking I was used to from women in markets, the deliberate kind that knew exactly what it was doing. This was the caught kind.

The kind that happened when someone was not expecting to find a face where they were looking and had not had time to arrange anything about their own expression.

Her hair was blonde, falling in loose waves around her face, the morning light catching it in a way that made it look almost gold. Her eyes were blue. Not a simple blue. The kind of blue that had different things happening in it depending on the light, sitting somewhere between the sky on a clear morning and deep water. Her cheeks were flushed from the embarrassment of the dropped basket, the collision, and being crouched on the ground of a busy market path.

She was the most unexpectedly beautiful person I had ever seen in my entire life.

She looked at my hand on hers, the apple caught between us, my face. Then she pulled her hand back quickly and looked at the ground.

"I am sorry," she said. Quiet. Barely above the noise of the market around us.

"Do not be," I said.

I was still looking at her. I was aware that I was still looking at her and that the appropriate thing to do was to stop and focus on helping collect the apples that were still making their escape across the path. I could not make myself stop.

I picked up the apple that had started all of this and held it out toward her.

She reached out and took it. Our fingers brushed again. The flush on her cheeks deepened into something warmer.

She did not say anything. She just looked at me for one more second with those blue eyes and then she nodded. Small and quick. A thank you without words. Then she stood, gathered her basket against her arm, and walked away into the crowd.

I stood up and watched her go.

I could not look away.

She moved through the market crowd with the ease of someone who knew the space well, stepping around people and between stalls without breaking her pace. Her hair moved when she walked. I watched it.

Then she glanced back.

Just once. A quick look over her shoulder at the way people looked when they wanted to check something without making it obvious that they were checking. She saw me standing exactly where she had left me, still looking, not having moved an inch.

The flush came back to her face immediately. She turned forward again and walked faster.

I stood there.

A hand came down on my shoulder hard enough to pull me back into the present from wherever I had gone.

"What are you looking at?"

I could not answer. I genuinely could not locate a single word. My voice had apparently decided to take the morning off.

"Torin."

Nothing.

"Torin." Louder this time.

I turned my head slowly. Rhydor was standing beside me with his axes presumably acquired, looking at me with the expression he used when something had happened that he was still gathering information about.

"I just saw an angel," I said.

He looked at me. Then he looked at the crowd in the direction I had been facing. Then back at me.

"You saw a woman," he said.

"No." I looked back at the place in the crowd where she had been before it swallowed her completely. "I saw an angel."

He was quiet for a moment.

"Did you get her name?" he asked.

My face did the thing faces did when they had just understood something unfortunate about their own recent behavior. I had been standing there. She had been right there. Our hands had touched twice. I had looked at her face for what felt like a significant amount of time.

I had not said a single word.

"No," I said.

"Then she was just a woman," Rhydor said. Flat. As a matter of fact. The tone of someone reporting weather conditions.

I turned and looked at him. "You did not see her."

"I saw you standing in the middle of a market path staring at nothing."

"She was not nothing." I looked back at the crowd one more time. She was gone. Completely absorbed by the morning traffic and the movement of people and the general indifference of a busy market to the specific problems of one specific person. "I have never seen anyone like her."

He looked at me with that expression that was hard to read because it was genuinely unreadable. Then he said nothing and started walking back through the market.

I followed.

The walk back was quieter than the walk in.

I moved through the crowd with my mind somewhere else entirely. The way she had looked at me when I picked up the apple. The way the flush had come back when she caught me still watching. The way she had not said anything, just that small nod, that small quiet thank you that had somehow said more than most people managed with full sentences.

"Still thinking about your angel," Rhydor said. Not really a question.

I smiled. I could feel that I was smiling and I did not particularly care. "Yes."

"You do not even know her name."

"I will. Soon."

I looked at the crowd around us one more time. She was not there. Of course, she was not there. She had walked away minutes ago, and the market was enormous, and she could be anywhere in it or out of it by now.

"I did not know someone like her existed in this town," I said.

Rhydor looked at me sideways. "You have lived here your entire life."

"I was not looking," I said simply.

He made a sound. Short and low and carrying a very specific quantity of skepticism.

"Weak excuse," he said.

"Not an excuse," I replied. "Just the truth." I looked at the path ahead of us. At the market, the stalls were thinning out toward the edge, where the stalls gave way to the regular streets of Hollowcrown.

"When you are not looking for something you do not see it. Even when it is right there."

Rhydor said nothing.

I glanced at him. At the closed-off face and the axes under his arm and the slight tightness around his jaw that meant something I had said had landed somewhere, it was going to sit for a while.

I did not press it.

I looked back at the street ahead and thought about blue eyes and blonde hair and a basket full of apples going in every direction at once and the particular way a person looked when they were caught being completely human in a public place and did not know what to do with it. ℯℯ𝘭.

I was going to find her.

I did not know how yet. I did not know her name or where she lived or which stall she had been heading toward when I walked into her. I had nothing except the memory of her face and the very specific way the morning light had caught her hair and the fact that she had looked back.

She had looked back.

That was something.

The market noise faded behind us as we walked. I kept moving with my hands back in my pockets and my mind already working through the problem of how a person found someone they knew nothing about in a town they had grown up in and somehow managed to never notice before this morning.

I was going to find her. Iwas already certain of it.